Last week, HTC & McLaren announced a special edition of the Vive Pro with McLaren likeness, which includes two different VR games with the McLaren themes. The bundle also comes with a 6 month prescription to Viveport, the official App Store for HTC Vive. The price mark for the bundle is $1,549, which is only $150 more than the generic Vive Pro kit. The games that included with this bundle are McLaren Garage Experience and rFactor 2 (McLaren Edition).
The looks, aesthetics, and hardware are all slightly different as well. The bundle comes in a McLaren themes box, the plastic surrounding the cameras on the headset are now orange, as well as the app buttons on the controller being orange too. In the box you can also find the SteamVR Tracking 2.0 base station and controllers.
After McLaren’s twitter tease, there was much room for imagination on what it could mean regarding its future with VR, but it is now released that through VR, you become a F1 pit crew. Using HTC’s controllers, you can become the tire gunner, tire mounter, and the tire demounted. With up to date leaderboards, you can compete other in the same game mode and see who can preform the fastest pit stop. rFactor 2 was released in 2013, but did not receive support from VR until 2017, when the game really took off on a focus with realism. It simulates the different psychics of the car, speed, and current driving conditions. In this McLaren edition you get the cars exclusively for the bundle. HTC is the sole producer for VR from McLaren, the two companies have announced. Their first partnership was at ChinaJoy in 2018, where the companies had a competition to see who could preform the fastest lap on a virtual track, using the Vive Pro headset. The car they used was a McLaren F1. With exciting product like this, we can expect to see them work together plenty in the future, as VR driving experiences are only growing
